The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk Page B

herself. She turned left into the gardens but made a detour towards me. She was moaning, her voice rising and falling like a seagull, weeping and sobbing. She obviously wanted the foreigner to hear this most sombre of protests. Then she entered the rose garden.
    Did we care? At that very moment, officials of Unocal (the Union Oil Company of California) and its Central Asian Oil Pipeline Project were negotiating with the Taliban to secure rights for a pipeline to carry gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through Afghanistan; in September 1996, the U.S. State Department had announced that it would open diplomatic relations with the Taliban, only to retract the statement later. Among Unocal’s employees were Zalmay Khalilzad—five years later, he would be appointed President George W. Bush’s special envoy to “liberated” Afghanistan—and a Pushtun leader called Hamid Karzai. No wonder Afghans adopted an attitude of suspicion towards the United States. America’s allies originally supported bin Laden against the Russians. Then the United States turned bin Laden into their Public Enemy Number One—a post that was admittedly difficult to retain in the Pentagon wheel of fortune, since new monsters were constantly being discovered by Washington, often in inverse proportion to its ability to capture the old ones. Now the Taliban were being courted. But for how long? Could bin Laden, an Arab whose political goals were infinitely more ambitious than the Taliban’s, maintain the integrity of his exile alongside men who wished only to repress their own people? Would the Taliban protect bin Laden any more courageously than had the failed Islamic Republic of Sudan?
    ON THE MOUNTAINSIDE, THE MACHINE continued his search of the machine. There was a cold moon now and, when the mist did not conceal its light, I could see the tall man’s tight lips and the sunken hollows of his cheeks beneath his shades. On the frozen mountainside, he opened the school satchel that I always carry in rough countries and fingered through my passport, press cards, notebooks, the pile of old Lebanese and Gulf newspapers inside. He took my Nikon camera from its bag. He flicked open the back, checked the auto-drive and then knelt on the stones by my camera-bag and opened each plastic carton of film. Then he put them all neatly back into the bag, snapped the camera shut, switched off the auto-drive and handed me the bag.
Shukran
, I said. Again, no reply. He turned to the driver and nodded and we drove on up the ice track. We were now at 5,000 feet. More lights flashed until we turned a corner past a massive boulder and there before us in the moonlight lay a small valley. There were grass and trees and a stream of unfrozen water that curled through it and a clutch of tents under a cliff. Two men approached. There were more formal Arab greetings, my right hand in both of theirs. Trust us. That was always the intention of these greetings. An Algerian who spoke fluent French and an Egyptian, they invited me to tour this little valley.
    We washed our hands in the stream and walked over the stiff grass towards a dark gash in the cliff face above us. As my eyes became accustomed to the light, I could make out a vast rectangle in the side of the mountain, a 6-metres-high air-raid shelter cut into the living rock by bin Laden’s men during the Russian war. “It was for a hospital,” the Egyptian said. “We brought our mujahedin wounded here and they were safe from any Russian plane. No one could bomb us. We were safe.” I walked into this man-made cave, the Algerian holding a torch, until I could hear my own crunching footsteps echoing softly from the depths of the tunnel. When we emerged, the moon was almost dazzling, the valley bathed in its white light, another little paradise of trees and water and mountain peaks.
    The tent I was taken to was military issue, a khaki tarpaulin roped to iron stakes, a flap as an